We Below
by Lachivo
Summary: We are the forgotten, invisible and small. Our deaths are statistics, not tragedies. Zootopia has let us down. Thus, we have found other ways to keep ourselves safe.
1. Bats

When I was a young pup, I was completely in love with the idea of justice.

It comes with being a bat. It's pretty deep in our culture that we have to serve the others and keep them safe. If you ever were to sit down and read some of the books we read to our pups, you would find that most of them deal either with migration, or with protecting mice, voles, dormice, rats, squirrels, you name it. We have a deep-seated identity as guardians, and most of the other small animals think of us that way.

But when we move up to larger animals - mustelids and up, really - they start to see us differently. They are scared of us. We are symbols of something spooky that visits you at night. And you know what, if you're a little history savvy, there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for that. Back in the olden days, bats would regularly make lives miserable for any large animal that pissed all over the smalls. You dig up a mouse warren or made a few squirrel families homeless because you wanted to build yourself a barn? Bats would take revenge at night, sabotage your building, steal your food, and generally terrorize you until you apologized. Kill any of the small folk in the process of that barn raising? Expect to lose a few children of your own, quietly poisoned so that one day, one of them just don't wake up. Did you quietly raze a rat nest, figuring no one would notice or care? Gear up for a plague to hit your town. Apparently, ungulates still have "if I should die before I wake" as part of their evening prayer. That's our ancestors' fault.

So yeah, big folks find us hella scary. I get that. We have a fucking spooky past, and bats in the old days did a lot to perpetuate that because it was useful back then. I mean, old-timey bat formal wear includes painting a big skull on your face for fuck sake. But our ancestors probably didn't ever foresee all of us animals living together in one big happy city, right alongside each other out in the open. And today, that spooky image is giving us a shitton of problems.

Take me, for example. Like I said, I think all bats grow up thinking we're gonna protect the small. I remember flying out of the Noc one day, somewhere down on the southwest side. I was in my rebellious young pup phase, and wanted to finally see why my parents were so adamant that I never fly there. It's a pred-heavy neighborhood. Didn't matter to me at the time - like I said, young pup who didn't know better. I was so sure that the pred-prey thing was a bullshit divide that could be overcome in an afternoon if we all just talked to each other. Looking back, I want to reach out and wing myself upside the head.

Anyway. It took me all of half an hour to find someone dealing drugs in a parking lot somewhere, and milliseconds for me to decide that I should stick my nose in and report it, like a good citizen. It took them all of two minutes to spot me. They had a baboon sittin on a fire escape with one of those mosquito swipers - it looks like a little squash racket, only it has electrified strings. The street name for them is "bat racket," go figure. He swatted me out of the air and through an open window in the other building. I landed straight into the living room of a weasel family, who proceeded to slap my numb ass around like a toy for breaking into their apartment. They then unceremoniously threw me out the window. I landed in a dumpster in the alley, which was now devoid of people seeing as the drug deal was long done and they presumably considered me dead.

When I was done throwing up - electricity does a number on us, and the dumpster didn't help - I flew back to the Noc and didn't speak to my parents or siblings for almost a day. My mom worked out what had happened from speaking to my friends, and finally went into my roost and sat me down to explain some realities to me.

Turns out my experience is pretty much standard for young bats, give or take some details and injuries. All young bats think they can make a difference in this city, and they always get up and try at least once, and they are almost always immediately swatted out of the air by mammals who have no patience for nosy snitches. Sometimes the story goes one step further, the bat makes it out and reports it to the police, only to find out that absolutely nobody in the police will believe an eye witness report if it comes from a bat. We're considered untrustworthy, y'see. We make spurious claims. We report people to get back at them for slights. We have poor vision and mistake identities easily. There's a hundred different excuses for why, and I'm sure every bat you meet can rattle off a different list, but when it comes right down to it, it all ends up in the same statement that they all think but never say:

You are more evil than what you are reporting.

As you might imagine, some bats are real bitter about that. I was one of them. Still am, to some extent. There's a reason so few bats ever take jobs outside of the Noc. We don't want to deal with the wispering, the stares, the fear responses. There's a running joke among the bats that we're the only species that know what the fight-or-flight response looks like in every single animal.

Thing is, that sort of shit gets to you eventually. Young bats like me, we grow up with a slight niggling in the back of our minds where we wonder whether we really are monsters. So we take jobs where we help people, as a result. Emergency responders down in the Noc are almost entirely rats and bats. Rats do the heavy lifting, bats get in and out anywhere we are needed. I was an EMT for a while, myself. Won't lie, I did the training mainly because I wanted to prove to the people up top that I wasn't a monster - I wanted to be admired for my service. Kama-zotz, I was so fucking young back then.

I made it my mission get transfered up top. There's a special division in the ZFR that has bats make speedy deliveries of medicine around the city. It's a glorified currier position, and way below my training, but it was all they would give me. I took it, figuring I could probably get promoted later once I'd proven myself. My mentor back then, a grizzled old vesper, told me not to. Said I'd regret it, and that they'd never actually let me help anyone who was in real trouble. I blew her off, because why the hell wouldn't they? Trouble was trouble. I couldn't shift a horse into a safe position, sure, but I could induce vomiting or pinch a blood vessel in any animal, regardless of size. And I could talk to people and calm them down. I was crisis trained. Of course I could be useful. Why would the perpetually-understaffed ZFR let a competent mammal waste away as a pill currier?

I figured it out after about three months on the job. Turns out, they didn't trust me around blood.

Desmodus don't even drink blood any more, we drink enriched coconut milk and bugmeal slurpees. It didn't matter in the slightest. They didn't want to tempt me by having me around blood all day. That's actually what one of my supervisors said to me, like I'm some kind of fucking alcoholic. He even said it like he was being kind. I think he genuinely thought he was.

I'm an animal that can damn near see the veins running under the skin of anyone I look at. I can give you a measure of core body temperature to within a few degrees accuracy in seconds. I can even smell blood types, and most blood-born pathogens, well enough that I can tell them apart. Tetanus smells like cookies and rust. Gangrene smells like rotten grapes. Staphilococcus smells like pretzels and spoiled mouse milk.

It didn't matter in the slightest. I'm a vampire bat. A parasite. I drink blood. I spread plagues and kill people in their sleep if I'm angry. In the name of progress, they'd let me in the core and let me be useful with my wings. But nobody would let me near anyone who was in actual trouble. And they genuinely, in their heart of hearts, thought it was for my own good that they torpedoed my career.

I quit that same day.

I was too proud to admit failure and return to the Noc, even though my family would have welcomed me back. They would have supported me if I'd asked - in fact, they called me an idiot repeatedly for saying no. But I wanted to make it in the way they did it up top. I wanted to be a part of what we have up here - the cross-species community with all those animals that used to fear me. I swear I genuinely believed in the Zootopian dream.

So I took a currier job, which was the only non-emergency response field I had any experience in. You'd be surprised how common that career trajectory is. Bats make good mail men. It's a hell of a lot quicker for a bat to deliver your rush mail or small packages than it is to have them taken from A to B on street level. And if you know anything about crime, you'll know it took about a week before a well-dressed black rat approached me to deliver a special package that I wasn't allowed to look in or ask questions about.

I wasn't stupid. I knew what I did was illegal. But I was so disillusioned at that point that I didn't care that I was breaking the law. Dealing with angry customers for any amount of time will quickly beat the last vestiges of faith in animal kind out of you, I assure you - and that goes double if you're one of the marginalized species. I thought, shit, this city is so eager to declare me a monster, it's not like I can lower people's opinion of me any further than it already is. And I needed the money. Roost space up top is hard to find, and the ones that rent out to desmodus are rarer still. Plus, you wouldn't believe how expensive a can of coconut milk suddenly becomes when a vampire bat wants to buy it.

I also needed it because I couldn't work all the time. I had to dedicate some of my hours to community service; more specifically, finding a type of community service that people would fucking let me do. Through one of my legit currier jobs, I got in touch with a wellfare organization that did outreach for the city's homeless population, and they needed people to seek out the homeless and check on them, make sure they hadn't wandered into the wrong biome and died from exposure, make sure there wasn't a disease spreading among one of the homeless communities, that sort of thing. I was perfect for that job, and actually enjoyed it. The homeless folks were no nicer to me than anybody else was, but at least I got to make a difference, and I got to use a bit of my damn EMT training. Most of the homeless were preds, 'phibs and reptiles, which shouldn't surprise you in the slightest.

Meanwhile, the drugs I was running were mainly stuff that would have an effect on ungulates and ursines, which somehow made it more acceptable to me. At that point in my life, I saw those species mainly in terms of how quickly they would take a swipe at me, and the very best of them, in my opinon, were the ones who got up to leave when they saw me. So it didn't matter that I was helping them poison themselves. As far as I was concerned, if a few of them died off, I was doing Zootopia a favour. I was fairly open about this belief, and with my somewhat... aggressive interpretation of what social justice was supposed to mean. I got to talking with one of my mysterious handlers about it at some point. He asked me some pointed questions about which species I wanted to die off, and I told him none of them, they all deserve to live, and well, they should just get the hammer until they learn to do so without shitting all over everyone they were living with. And apparently that was the right thing to say, because the next time I was supposed to receive a package for delivery, a spectral bat showed up at my door instead.

You gotta understand, spectres are like royalty in the bat community. In the old days, they were trained from birth as a kind of combined priest and warrior caste that would enforce religious law, until they quietly gave up that power in modern times and took a backseat when democracy became the norm. Velvet revolution. But they still have a ton of power and respect.

So when I got up off the floor and got over the fact that a spectral was asking to roost with me, she introduced herself as Cacuango. She told me that my story was common enough that they perked up whenever they heard about someone who fit into the pattern that I had fallen into. Qualified individual came from the Noc and tried to make it in the broader Zootopia, only to get a hard dose of reality. Took shit jobs, try to scrape by, try to still make a difference, but slowly becoming more and more bitter and more and more extreme. She told me that the patern was so predictable that she could even tell me exactly how the story continued. I would deliver worse and worse stuff, develop a more an more extreme hate for all species around me, until one day, I would deliver something that someone would try to kill me for. If I survived, I would either quit crime or continue. If I quit, I would swiftly become homeless, because I had no other marketable skills in Zootopia, and my disposition wouldn't allow me to go back to working the legal shit jobs - and neither would the mob. Best case, I would return to my family as a broken shell of a bat and try to start my life over in the Noc. If I didn't quit, the mobsters would push me to become a criminal full time, and I would become yet another blip in the Zootopian crime statistic - either as a convict when I got caught, or as a corpse when I screwed up.

She let me digest that for a while. I remember hanging next to her in silence for almost half an hour while she let me think. I don't think I would have taken that message from just anybody, but it carried so much weight when it came from her. I asked her if there was a third option. She told me yes, yes there was.

Zootopia has a problem with the small animals. It's a problem that's as old as animal kind, and it'll be a problem still when we all die. The smallest officer in the Zootopian Police Department at time of writing is a cottontail rabbit. What exactly is she supposed to do when a rat kills a mouse in its apartment? How, precisely, is she supposed to investigate a crime scene that she can't physically enter? How is she supposed to go door to door, when she can't even enter the tunnels under the city where most of us live?

Crime among the smalls is almost never reported as a result. People know it's useless. The faith among rodents in the police is so jaw-droppingly low, you wouldn't believe it. So they gather in small enclaves. They move into a building, buying every single apartment and turning them into rodent-sized dwellings so that basically nobody other than rodents can even come inside. They then hire private guard contractors to watch for trouble, making their little gated communities safe for rodents and basically nobody else.

Now, if you have some sense, you're probably wondering how they can afford all this. I mean, you get enough hard-working rodents to club together and you can put some real money on the table, sure, but not enough to buy an apartment block in inner city Zootopia. Or for that matter, making Little Rodentia a reality. If you think about it, rodents almost never have high-paying jobs. They rarely ever have university degrees, either. Neither do bats. We don't value intellectual pursuit, and generally consider it pointless to even try. We also have kinda short lifespans, so studying twelve years to become a doctor is more of a commitment for a mouse than it is for a monkey. As a result, the small folk are poor, uneducated, and mainly do menial jobs or skilled manual labour.

So where is all the money coming from?

The word was out of my mouth before Cacuango even had time to say it. The mob.

The mafia has a very, very tight grip on property and social services down in the Noc, but up in Zootopia proper, their power is damn near absolute. Rodents barely bother to pay tax to the city, paying it instead directly into the coffers of the Cosa Nostra. Cacuango opened my eyes to it, explaining how it all worked. Zootopia couldn't protect the smalls, so they found a different place to buy their protection. Most rodent communities knew damn well that the mafia were a bunch of brutal killers, but it didn't matter. It was the only kind of protection they could trust to show up when they called. And so, the deal with the devil was made, and the smalls had been in the grip of a continuous crime wave for almost a hundred years, with the city being utterly powerless to stop it. Every time the ZPD tried to make inroads, it was halted. You know the rasons as well as I do:

"There is no need for a Little Rodentia task force - they are handling it on their own, and what would you do, hire a rat as a cop? Psh! Yeah, right! They would be crooked by the end of the first week!"

"How could harmless little mice actually pose a serious threat? I mean come on! They're mice! What would they do, run away really aggressively?"

"Listen, I realize that we're supposed to be progressive here, but making a task force to handle bat informants is just asking for crazy liars to line up and force the ZPD to wade through spurrious nonsense; I mean you know what bats are like."

Argument after argument that the bigoted old dipshits have been using for years to keep us down has been turned into weapons that the mafia is using to systematically dismantle every single effort to do something about the problem, and by now, it's so entrenched that we don't even question it any more. Cacuango was telling me nothing I didn't already know, but somehow, I always just thought of it as life. The bigs didn't care, so we had to take care of ourselves. That's why we had such enormous families - our clans were our social safety net, because we didn't have the government one to fall back on. I'd never questioned it either.

She wondered aloud if I could guess what she was about to ask me. I told her I desperately hoped that she was about to ask me if I wanted to help her do something about it. Because otherwise, I was going to do something myself. She smiled. Apparently, that had been the correct answer.


	2. Rats

I have never been good at picking up on warnings.

I remember my siblings were gathered around the table that night, shoulders huddled together, smoking and drinking and talking in quiet, serious voices. I was too small to understand what was going on back then. But when you're a rat, there are some rules you learn quick and well down in the Nocturnal Districts. Angry young rats gathering in groups means you need to find another place to be, and fast. I would routinely fail to notice when the mood had shifted from hanging out to talking war. I'm a distracted soul, I'm afraid. Tension in the air tended to rise quite a bit before I would finally pick it up.

I remember I was surprised when they left, that night, all 14 of my brothers and sisters. To me, back then, they seemed like they were adults, but looking back now, they would have been barely past children.

None of them came home.

The feud between the browns and us blacks has been going for as long as I've been alive. Our parents fought this conflict too, and our grandparents. I'm told there was a lull for the last ten years or so, but that the conflict has started to flare up again. I try to stay out of it as much as possible, but they listen to me, do the other rats. I am often told to weigh in, even though I rarely have anything new to say. We are a remarkably vindictive species, us rats. We nurse grudges that can last for generations, and formulate plans of revenge that can stretch just as far. We work with those whom we fully intend to betray because it will hurt them more. We change allegiances based on the politics of today, but also that of our parents, and grandparents, many generations back.

I was spared the worst of it growing up, because my brothers always told me I needed to stay with my books and study. They would always tell me I was so smart, way too smart to waste my life fighting and chopping crack. I needed to escape to topside, they told me, and make something of myself. I needed to prove to them all that rats weren't idiots and crooks. It probably would have resonated stronger with me if it hadn't come from my brothers. I loved them, they were my family, but by Frith, they were idiots and crooks.

After they were all butchered in a needless gang war, my family poured all their attention and money into me instead. My parents were a young couple, and my mother had become barren after her second birth, so I was my family's last shot at making a future retirement fund for themselves. In me, they saw a rat who could potentially support them just as well as my whole crop of brothers could have, if only I could harness my, to them, prodigious intelligence. I went to university, studied economics like I was supposed to, and got a well-paid job at a small accounting office on the outskirts of the Nocturnal Districts, and a nice apartment on the second floor. My parents became significantly less stressed when I got a well-salaried position. Now it is merely grandchildren they bother me about.

When I describe it, I know it sounds horribly cynical of them, but if you are not a rodent yourself, I'm afraid you wouldn't understand. Our fair city of Zootopia has so very little in the way of social assistance for the residents of the Nocturnal Districts. Social services money is routinely stolen and redirected, leaving us with nothing but our families to rely upon for help when we grow old. Hence why we make them so large. I have 241 uncles and aunts, and more cousins than I have in all honesty bothered to keep track of. I know only a couple of their names. But I fear they all know mine. I give quite a few of them financial advice.

Public officials rarely notice that the money has been redirected, because why would they? It is usually a mere few cents per household, after all - hardly above the margin of error. But as so often, larger animals fail to grasp the scale difference that occurs when you enter the world of the small animals. A few cents per household sounds like so very little, but in the city of Zootopia there are millions of mice, millions of rats, millions of lizards and bats and voles and lemmings and dormice. A few cents off of all of them will net you a sizable invisible economy.

Besides, the scale of our household economics remain difficult to explain to larger animals. They think of a missing few cents as barely more than a rounding error, a victimless crime. And indeed, a few cents might buy a bovine precious little - she needs pound after pound of hay to feed her family. But for a rat family, a few dags - decagrams, ten grams - of food per nose will do for a meal. A few cents often represent a not insignificant percentage of our monthly income. In the Noc, goods and services are priced in mils. Thousandths of a dollar. The coins look like this, see? Many large animals have never even seen them before. They would hardly have a reason to - what would a large animal buy with a cent, let alone a tenth of a cent?

If you have heard of the Lemming Brothers investment bank, their specialty is to speculate in the differences in economic scale between different size categories of the animal kingdom. Few people are in fact aware that this is how they make their money; most simply know them as the rodent bank where all of the other little rodent banks have their accounts so we can cash out in physically and denominationally smaller bills and coins. And that is certainly one of their branches, but it is far from their main one, or even their biggest one.

But I digress. I was talking about the stolen small-scale economy. It is a topic that is very dear to me, because I am an accountant, and shifting numbers is one of the few ways I have of helping my fellow small animals with their plight. And they are indeed in a horrible plight, although it is often an underreported one. The conflict between the brown rats and black rats has become more open again this past year after the Bellweather Hoax. The climate of fear that it left has proven fertile ground for opportunistic criminal activity, and the effort to quell the street violence in the Noc has suffered some terrible setbacks as a result. I can do nothing about this. But by Frith, I can make sure that we get what precious little we deserve.

It was no less a battle in the financial offices. Every day I saw little attempts to skim off the top, round down here and there, try to wrestle perforated economies into legal forms that might fool me. Were I any other species, I fear it would have worked. But I grew up in the Nocturnal Districts. I know all of their little tricks. In the office, I was known as a particularly pedantic accountant who would pinch every penny and go over even the most innocuous expense claim. They never understood, and I fear they never shall. But the criminals certainly understood. All legal accountants know that they are in a dangerous field where they oversee the vulnerable underbelly of the criminal world. Make no mistake, any competent accountant knows when they are hurting the criminals. It is an unspoken agreement of managing funds in the Noc. So long as we leave well enough alone, we are beneath their notice. But like I mentioned earlier, I am a distracted soul who was never good at picking up on subtle warnings.

Eight months ago, they finally decided to spell it out for me. I remember working with my colleague Charles Aurhorn, a bull of some skill when it came to overseeing foreign transfers, and with whom I had attended college. We bonded over our backgrounds, both of us math nerds coming from cultures that did not particularly value intellectualism, and we had become close friends. I was sitting on his horn and reading along with him, as usual, when I noticed that my perch was quite cold. If you are unaware, cattle horns are usually warm, a little below their body temperature. He had been acting a bit off all morning, and I finally asked him if he was alright. He slurred his response slightly, managing only a few words before he sunk into his chair and lost consciousness. I was thrown onto his desk, shocked but unhurt, and tried desperately to rouse him. I had barely managed to dig out my phone to dial for an ambulance before a voice behind me told me not to bother. That if he ever woke up, he wouldn't recognize me anyway.

On the desk with me stood a cat in a suit. He informed me that Charles had uncovered a particularly illegal and ill-covered foreign transaction, and had decided to go to the police with it in spite of their warnings. This was the consequence, and he felt like it was a good opportunity to give me a practical demonstration in what happened when you stick your nose in where it isn't wanted. Charles had ignored his final warning, he told me. I was now being given my final warning. I needed to get with the program, or find another career. He then turned and left.

I was barely coherent with fear when I called for an ambulance for Charles. Still, I did have the wherewithal to tell them he was poisoned, and to bring antidotes for anything they could possibly think of that might fell a bovine. They came as quickly as they could, and I rode along with them to the hospital, sitting by his ear and talking to him the whole time. I will remember the feeling of his cold horn under my paws for the rest of my life. It felt as if it was hollow.

He lived. But the cat was quite right that he wasn't the same. The poisoning had given him permanent brain damage. Significant personality changes, permanent memory loss, and loss of a few of his higher cognitive skills. His days of juggling large numbers in his head was over.

In the end, he did recognize me. I still visit him, every now and again. He is a warehouse worker now. I remember sitting on his family's table after he had gone to bed, always early because he never has much energy. His father told me that he always hoped his son would enter a more physical occupation so he didn't waste away over books. But not like this. Never like this.

The cat had set out to frighten me, and he certainly managed that. However, he had also set out to deter me from picking at criminal transactions, and in this, he was less successful. If you can believe it, I never actually wanted to specifically bother the mob. I always just wanted to do my job right, and uncovering their various dalliances and underhanded tricks was never my main intention. It simply happens sometimes when you do the job as well as you can.

But that changed, with what happened to Charles. I was never good at picking up warnings. Before, I was simply a paper pusher. Now, I became a hunter.

I set up a hidden office for my new hobby within a few days of coming back from the hospital, taking all the confidential financial documents that I had access to with me. I split my time between one office and the other, keeping up the appearance of having learned my lesson and been cowed into silence. I was aware that this was terribly illegal, and quite sure that if I was ever caught, the police would have no patience for my story of justice and revenge - never mind the mafia. But I had found something that was much more important to me than my own financial stability, my career, or even my freedom.

I started with the transaction documents that Charles had overseen, and worked my way backwards from there. For months, I tracked the documents and familiarized myself with the ins and outs of illegal transaction. I learned which banks only existed on paper, and which existed in reality but were bought and overseen by criminals. I learned how to track black market value (you would be surprised how similar it is to tracking the open market), and how to predict fluctuations based in illegal goods prices based on movements in the open market and legislature. I learned who sold what. I learned to hear, from the way they presented their arguments, which pundits and politicians played into the mob's hands, and to flag them for possible bribery. I learned how bribes were conducted, how racketeering worked, how assassination worked in the market. I even learned who the cat that murdered Charles was. His name is Giovanni Blanca. He works for an arctic shrew known widely as Timur Velikodush, and in the criminal world as Mr. Big.

If you, like me, have grown up on stories about gangsters, you will have read a story or two featuring a character that is a professional assassin. You may be surprised to learn, then, that the idea of a professional assassin is quite quaint and almost non-existent in the criminal underworld. Assassins, by and large, are desperate animals that work low-level expendable positions for the organized crime families. They are offered a sizable amount of money for carrying out the murder, with the understanding that they will most likely die or go to prison in the attempt. If they succeed, the money is paid to their next of kin, often their starving children or deeply indebted parents. Assassins are extremely expendable, rarely work more than a single job, and almost always die in the attempt. They also, surprisingly, rarely ever kill anybody other than other gangsters. There is an understanding that you are supposed to keep conflicts between the families as secret as possible, and that the language of the criminal families does not adequately work to convey messages to the non-criminal world. I feel a grim sort of pride in that I and Charles, being outside of the families, warranted such a harsh response to our actions.

Mr. Blanca is an exception. He is a chemist, which is mob shorthand for poisoner. In a city of thousands of different animals, poisoning is the weapon of choice to commit murder. It is a weapon that eliminates all questions of scale; if a mouse wants to assassinate a lion, it is the most realistic method. Organized criminal cartels have at least one or two chemists on retainer to mix their poisons, which an expendable pawn will then administer to the intended victim. Blanca is an exception because he enjoys showing up to the scenes of the crimes he helped facilitate, if he thinks he can get away with it. He is a sadist who delights in seeing his victims suffer, and has a more hands-on approach than chemists usually take.

In my hubris, I thought this would be his undoing. I wend online through a secure connection and bought illegal hacking software to snoop into his financial situation, track his movements, and list his contacts, hoping to catch him in the act. Incidentally, the notion of a professional hacker is also utterly antiquated in the criminal world. Hacking today mainly involves becoming au fait with a few black market programs which does most of the work for you. Modern hackers are more akin to black market software companies that make illegal tools and provide tech support for them. One of my programs even has a help desk number. It is all very hands-off and professional... so hands-off, in fact, that it never occurred to me that the animal I bought the program from and the animal I was tracking might know each other.

I am alive today, not because of luck, but because of the elaborate skillset of a very hidden group of animals. The day the killers came for me, I was working in my hidden office above a used book store. I had an arrangement with the sow whose shop space I lived in, and kept out of sight for most of the day. That particular day, I remember her suddenly leaving around lunchtime, which I thought was quite strange. She usually didn't leave the shop for her lunch. I had several nooks where I could peek into the shop below, and saw two weasels slinking through the shop floor, heading straight for the bathroom that held the entrance to my office. I immediately took my computer made for my emergency exit, sneaking through a small hole into the tenement stairwell next to the shop, only to discover none other than Blanca himself standing below the stairs for me, smoking catnip and presumably waiting for me to dart out onto the street. I almost did, were it not for a voice above me telling me to follow.

Above me was a bat, scarcely larger than a rat cub. He looked straight at me and called me by name, telling me to follow him upwards. I was too terrified at this point to reason well, or I might have questioned moving upwards in the building that I wanted to escape. But I followed him into the megafauna-sized apartment above the bookshop itself, where a kindly but alcoholic horse lived and wasted away most of his day. The door was open, and the horse fast asleep in his easy chair. Waiting for us in the room, however, was the largest bat I have ever seen. I had heard of flying foxes, but I admit, I always thought the stories about their size to be fanciful exaggerations. I assure you, my friend, they really are the size of winged dogs.

In complete silence, I was swiftly deposited in a canvas pouch under the bat's belly, and both bats took off out of the window with me as a passenger. Had I not been so terrified, I would have enjoyed the flight. It is an exceedingly liberating feeling. At the time, however, I keenly felt that I was being flown away from any sort of chance of having a normal life again. It was, in many ways, a transformative experience. I was snatched from the jaws of death that day, and emerged with a more steeled resolve than before, but also with the keen understanding that the life I knew was over.

They spirited me away to a safehouse where a kindly gopher checked me over for injuries. I was shaken, but unhurt, thanks to the swift action of the bats. I was introduced to a handler of theirs, a mammal named Cacuango, who informed me that they had been observing my activities through the dark web for months, considering whether they should put me in a safehouse. It turns out I had been nowhere near as careful as I thought. It was only a matter of time before my activities were discovered and I was murdered for them, she told me - and most of my family with me.

I remember her pausing at this point, simply looking at my face. She looked as if she had more to say, but instead she said:

"You already know, don't you. You knew, even as you did it. You knew this would mean your life."

I nodded at this. I was quite aware. But this was more important than me, I told her, and even more important than my family. I was perfectly aware that they would try to hit them next - I even knew how. The brown rats would most likely break into my family's burrow within the next few days. Cacuango offered to move them into hiding, and I remember telling her that if she felt she had to, I would be grateful. But whether or not they were murdered would have no bearing on my willingness to continue digging. In fact, they would become merely another reason on an already remarkably long list.

It shocked her, I could tell. But bats love their families. They are so very close-knit. Rats are a more pragmatic sort. We have lived in conflict for many generations, and are quite ready to let each other go. Especially for revenge.

In the end, it was too late. The browns had broken in the same day they had tried to kill me. My parents escaped the purge, as did a few of my uncles and aunts, and they all work with me now, digging just like I am. Hunting, just like I am. Their lists of grievances with the criminal cartels are now almost as long as mine.

We are a remarkably vindictive species, us rats. We can fight the same battle for as long as our family line is alive. And we will.

For Charles.


End file.
